


My unlikely existence and other superpowers: sex, disability, and trauma in my fandom art and fiction

by Gilded_Pleasure



Category: Elementary (TV), Original Work, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: And be true to myself by saying what I apparently need to say, I'm going to talk about Adult Things, If it isn't obvious, this is META!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:34:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23316940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gilded_Pleasure/pseuds/Gilded_Pleasure
Summary: This is meta!The last dozen times I've sat down to write, ONLY this will come out.So have it, and hopefully now I can move forward <3
Comments: 18
Kudos: 26





	My unlikely existence and other superpowers: sex, disability, and trauma in my fandom art and fiction

So.

Any character I write or draw, canon or just my interpretation, have various physical, mental, intellectual/cognitive, and developmental disabilities. Even when I don’t go out of my way to say it or call it something specific, they do. I write it into their lives the same way I put anything else in there, and it helps me come up with plots and character development because I know how they work.

They’re characters I can relate to, with problems I understand.

A big reason I come up with complete magic systems, complex xenobiology, and physics for my fics was because otherwise I get to a plot point and actually have no idea what happens. But if I have rules to consult, they kinda…help me decide and explain what happens.

You could say...I make my own rules.

Similarly, that’s how I construct characters. I give them traits and tendencies and backstories so I know how they react to the plot events.

A lot of the ways I describe this stuff...it’s designed so only people who ARE that way will usually recognize it. Everything from medical conditions, to sex work, to racial coding. People who aren't usually don’t notice at all, or I put it there in ways that make it easy for them to just...not notice. That’s on purpose.

Here are two salient points about the Reader in my Osteogenesis fics that I think most people gloss over, and I wrote them so that could happen. These things are implied heavily without forcing anyone to confront it.

The first is that Reader did sex work after their mother's death in order to support their younger sibling and pay their mother’s funeral expenses.

The second is that Reader was born as the result of incestuous abuse of their mother.

The latter is a REAL light touch, for reasons I imagine are obvious. But I make plenty of references to their identity issues, not necessarily knowing what race/mix they are, that their birth certificate is falsified, etc.

I also put in there that Reader’s mother did in fact kill her own abusers and fake her own death. When later, Reader was abused as a child by an unnamed and unspecified party, their mother faked her own and both her children’s deaths and moved them somewhere else. Sans knows Reader’s mother is a justified murderer, and believes they probably would have gotten along.

A Certain Tenderness is a story that’s cluttered with confusing details, and so much of how it’s experienced varies wildly deepening on the individual's life an experiences that happens to be reading it. It’s a “you’ll recognize it if it’s you” kind of story.

Why would I do that?

Because I’m going to put what I want in my stories, and I’m not interested in arguing about it. Because I want people to feel seen without being put on display. Because I wanted reading it to feel like what it’s like to be that way. Because I want to have my own quiet feelings in my heart that shapes the events, and other people are both welcome, and can just deal with it.

I’m still baffled that _anyone_ reads them. (less so with the art, but yeah still that.) They do make a lot of people angry, OR people just love them a LOT. The most common opinion either way is that they are not what was _expected_. That’s something I not only have no control over, but is a very common theme in every aspect of my life.

Speaking of angry…hoo.

My art. We can start with Undertale and its various permutations of fandom/s.

Ok. I draw Sans/the Sanses short and chubby because that’s what I like. I draw their bodies without clothes like they have various conditions, congenital or medical, that make people small or short. It's in line with the way I write them. I don’t have to say that, and most people don’t notice because why would you? It’s just kind of for me to know and be made happy by, which is why I draw and write at all.

I have significantly different attitudes from the majority of fandoms about sexuality & nudity, a product of values and a culture that I was raised with. Don’t really want to explain it here, just read this if you need to:

<https://twitter.com/gilded_pleasure/status/1242141389678358530>

Sharing what I create with people in this sense, is...new? Relatively. For me. I have never shared fan fic, or art, nor have I ever been Horny On The Internet before. People sometimes draw weird conclusions or make assumptions.

Here’s some knowledge!

I’m profoundly disabled!! I’ve spent my life fucking people who are also disabled! I’m painfully familiar with the idea that there’s something “wrong” with me for being attracted to them, AND simultaneously that anyone attracted to ME must have a ~nasty fetish~.

All that garbage certainly helped shape my opinions about people with ~nasty fetishes~.

The wrongheaded idea that sexual content created by individuals requires some kind of permission slip from strangers who fancy themselves amateur ethicists (as well as being addicted to performative bullying) is also a new one. It has precedent, however, in that it is reflective of many societies’ attitudes about sexuality and disability as a whole. Its _method_ is new. Many catalysts that cause people to behave that way are new.

The ideas that drive and perpetuate it are not.

I’d posit questions like “what the fuck am I supposed to do, since I am myself, by DEFAULT, a ~nasty fetish~ who never had access to being “wholesome” in the first place”?

But I already know! I’ve known my whole life, because people made sure I knew! I’m supposed to go in a hole and be a celibate hermit so I don’t gross out Real People (TM).

This isn’t a fucking “internet argument”.

I’ve had physically present strangers ask me if I “can have sex.” To the point where it’s an inside joke between me and my partner. That, by the way, is a combo of “do you need a caretaker’s permission” and “are you physically capable”. It’s not a proposition. Although sometimes it turns into one, or something way grosser.

I’m too disabled to live on my own, AND am considered conventionally attractive in certain ways. I’m also a bingo card of other “labels” which makes the fact that I’m still alive kind of an amazing thing.

I’ll give you a minute to just kind of imagine what my life has been like. What the ubiquitous issues have been there.

No, go ahead.

I’ll wait.

I know what sex is and what it isn’t. I know what consent is and what it isn’t. I reject people’s attempts to ruin sex for me. I reject the paradigm that I am fit only to be a Thing which Actual People do awful things to.

Did u know more people are comfortable with the idea of me being a victim of assault than me wanting and having consensual sex of any kind?

No, I want you to sit with that for a minute.

Me being able to consent to sex is somehow more “perverted”

Than someone sexually assaulting me.

“Poor Thing” is easier for them to accept than “Real Person With Agency.”

And now I will give you a moment to try and imagine just how angry I am literally all the time, constantly. It’s entirely possible you don’t have to imagine it. Plenty of people know.

I avoid talking about this stuff too much because I refuse to pull the pin on the grenade of bitterness my heart could easily become.

What our lives have been like affects art we create. That’s something I am astounded that people who insist a work of fiction 3 people will see will make The Blank Slate Children Do A Violence disingenuously refuse to take into account. But that’s only because nothing they say is actually about WHAT they say. It’s about what they’re doing, and their need to keep doing it. Moral panics make me bored and tired, and there’s always one happening so I won’t bother getting into it more.

Osteogenesis is a horror story that uses horror tropes turned inside out in a lot of ways. The usual narrative around disability+horror is gross and I don’t like it. Instead I posit the true horror of disability is being made into a Poor Thing. It deals with medical, physical, sexual, and reproductive abuse.

Sans the skeleton monster is physically disabled, and because of that his body does something his already-abusive caretaker/relative decided to...hmm. Let’s go with “commodify”.

Papyrus is developmentally disabled, and I think a lot of people don’t pick up on that. Probably because he’s also wildly eccentric, very flamboyant, and self aware; all things we’re not  
“supposed” to be. To the point where a lot of people decide those traits automatically invalidate each other.

Inverted horror trope: disabled people, especially disabled children, are horrifically vulnerable to unimaginable abuse, but we have to imagine it in order to admit it happens, to protect people, and to keep it from happening to anyone else. I’m...not telling you anything except the plot of the story right now. There are thousands of words I’ve written about how societies I made up give children agency and prevent abuse.

That’s the plot...

What the series is _about_ is the quietly defiant joy of finding love, accepting love, and taking back your own sexual agency.

That’s not the only series I have.

“Within These Walls” is an Elementary set of fics about Joan Watson and Sherlock Holmes being really fucked up, in the ways canon never LET them be! It never took enough time to really allow the characters to develop, and instead just kept kind of resetting them, or failing to realize that everyone watching the show was watching for the characters. People die, no one grieves. Trauma happens, then everyone just *1 hour of cartoon splat noises. The status quo changes forever, then disappears the next episode. There are the same complaints most people have about the show.

I think there’s been less stink about my Elementary fics because the fandom’s small, older, and super mellow for the most part.

Those are my earliest fics! And so it surprises me that people might get the idea that I am Captain Performatively Wholesome, because I began with making fucked up relationships a little _more_ fucked up! I didn’t have to do that. I just wanted to. Speaking of wanting to.

I started writing fic in the first place because I wanted to write something sexually explicit. To express my sexuality in ways I’ve been discouraged from...not by my family, or my community, or my lovers. By random ass people who don’t fucking know me from a hole in the wall. And alternately both online and off, by people who just have a lot of sexual shame and my frankness makes them uncomfortable. This latter I am actually very...willing to work with, because this is a cultural difference.

Anyhow. Elementary.

I was like… “What if Joan and Sherlock’s relationship was actually as codependent as it’s depicted as, and they also started having sex because of that?” Sherlock’s autistic and has severe addiction problems on several fronts; Joan has complex abandonment issues and a big, steamy case of PTSD. The presence of absence of sex in their relationship is kinda beside the point, it’s just the vehicle I used to tell their story because I’m horny and I’d totally do both of them. Which is my criteria for ever writing M/F couples.

Speaking of which, I think people...assume...that’s what I’m writing with my uhh, weird Gregmethyst preoccupation? but it’s not. Amethyst is even less W0mA11!!n than most gems, and is said to have “experimented with male forms”. That’s a canon quote from The Guide To the Crystal Gems. Now. It might be an error, but “form” is NOT “shapeshifting”, according to SU canon. Changing your form is something you do when you get poofed and come back. People might want to get all mifty about the presence or absence of dicks, but PFFF, don’t make it weird. All that needs to happen is Amethyst says “I’m male”.

I wrote a story about that a few years back, and got carpetbombed with “kill yourself” in the comments. I ended up taking it down, because that was way more trouble than it was worth, and there’s no way it had anything to do with what I wrote. I did not take that personally. How could I? That kind of behavior says a lot more about that person than it does about my 2k word Amethyst centric GENfic, for fucks sakes.

It sure hurt my feelings anyway!

So the way I write Gregmethyst reads a lot more M/M than people might expect. It also helped/s me come to terms with being like almost 40 and realizing I’m things called “demisexual” and “aromantic” AT THE SAME TIME, which, uh. What the fuck?? I can’t do casual OR committed?? How does that even work??

I’ve never actually said that to any living soul before, for a few reasons. Biggest one’s probably I’m so exhausted and burnt out from trying to explain how I am to people, I kind of actively don’t want to and also desperately crave understanding. Because the burden of my difference always is on ME, because for some reason I’m a minority in all the ways. At this point it’s like...you know what, other people can just fuckin deal with it. I am tired.

Welp, my fics are full of the kinds of relationships I’ve had and have, which are often really ambiguous or like, emotionally intense and occasionally (or alternately, VERY) sexual friendships and/or partnerships. Plenty have not been what people imagine when I say that. I’ve had two relationships that lasted more than ten years, and most of them have had the same shapes you see in my work.

A lot more people enjoy that than I was expecting!!

I suck at writing feelings like sexual jealousy, possessiveness, and _inherent_ sexual shame because I have never felt those feelings. Not that I can’t write sexual shame! It’s just acquired and explained by circumstance rather than being inherent to sexuality itself.

Speaking of which.

I’m about halfway through posting Silverfell, the harrowing and horrifying sequel to A Certain Tenderness, and the mass exodus has begun. I expected it, and that happens with a lot of my work. As has the people going through and un-bookmarking everything I’ve ever written because of events in one of my fics; it’s happened before, and yeah I expected it. Can’t get eternally tainted by the icky stickies of having had a conversation about bread in the same Starbucks line ten years ago with someone who likes vore!!

There is a TON of sexual shame in Silverfell! But it’s acquired through circumstance, and comes from a different place than like...being embarrassed by your body’s capacity to feel pleasure? As a mathematical function, it behaves differently all the way to and from its origin.

Here come a few minor spoilers! For my fics...which. I don’t even know if that CAN count as spoilers but *shrug.

The Fell versions of my Sans and Papyrus have the same backstory of severe sexual (and otherwise) abuse as the ‘vanilla’ ones, with the change of _not_ having a supportive community, and they also remember it. Instead they’re in a remarkably hostile environment, not too much different than many people have had to cope with. What they end up with is an incestuous, abusive, and dubiously consensual sexual relationship with each other (they’re brothers) because of both severe (incestuous; sexual) abuse as children, combined with the unliveably violent conditions of the environment they kind of failed to survive. Basically.

It’s pretty unpleasant. I wrote nearly all of it in advance so I wouldn’t blink on the bad parts; right now i’m just going through and filling in the transitions. Their relationship will be explored, and it will be found out if it can be improved in any way. See if after a life of hurting others and themselves, if something else can happen instead.

I think that falls into a category I guess a lot of people decided “aren’t allowed” to be written about?

I guess if I’d ever been asking for fucking permission, I’d be pretty bothered!

Again, I’ve had a ton of people expect me to need their random ass moral permission to have sex at all with the people of my choosing, and...yeah. That shit doesn’t fly with me.

And YET I am bothered, but that’s not why. The bothered feeling is actually just, hurt feelings you get when someone who might really like you otherwise, or that you thought you could like, gets a wrong idea about you, or dislikes you for something you can’t help. It’s surprisingly painful, and I’m also really used to it.

(It reminds me of the feeling I got when I figured out someone I thought was attracted to me….actually like the idea of themselves as someone who’d be attracted to some(thing)one like me. Like, they wanted to fuck me for...what do they call it these days? Clout, I think. Fucking as praxis, you guys!! People did that shit before they used words like that. Honestly it feels worse than chasers. Like being near me makes them dirty, or rebels, or like they’re ‘slumming’.)

I’m balking with moving forward with most of my stories right now, partly because I’d been increasingly concerned I have a communication issue. But over time, I’m moving away from thinking it’s my problem, and moving towards thinking it’s a social environment problem.

Here’s the thing. This whole...idea...when it comes to social media and needing external validation to be what you already are...hoo boy. I did not ask anyone’s permission to be gay or trans or disabled or brown any of the other 500 tiresome ass things I am. I got squirted out this way, and believe me. People made sure I knew it. I don’t need permission to exist.

And this means something different than most assume. I mean like. You know those posts about “Why don’t they have gay cafes/nonsexual spaces for the homos???” that get around every social media site every few months?

I’m baffled because you (yes, YOU!) make any place gay by 1. being gay and 2. going there.

They’ve always existed, and I think this is KNOWN.

What the problem is, is people waiting for PERMISSION.

With a side order of “a place where no one can criticize me”.

Now, that is bullshit. My life has at many points become a washing machine drowning me in the shitty behavior of people desperate to avoid criticism or be responsible for their own random ass likes and dislikes. Endlessly subjecting me to a litany of what <<how they feel about me>> says about THEM. It’s so fucking dysfunctional I don’t even have words for it, and that’s really saying something.

What I see as an overall zeitgeist in the past 15-20 years or so is a lot of people slavering with desperation for RULES TO FOLLOW. This shocks me. They want to be told what to do, and thusly be protected from the consequences of both their honest mistakes and their intentionally shitty behavior. I think they don’t actually see a difference, and that frightens me.

Hence the rise of the cult of personality that informs the performative bullying in online spaces that’s become the norm, and the creation of online echo chambers. People raise up kings to rule them, and then behead them weekly.

This informational and social dysfunction leads to people who will take any piece of new information as “proof” of what they already believed. It leads to stolen words stripped of meaning to become catchphrases that signal nothing but in-group and out-group status.

It’s a psychological side effect of the existence of the internet. There’s too much information constantly bombarding everyone, along with unbearable pressure to 1. understand it and 2. apply it “correctly” or perform your understanding to an audience you can’t choose.

This leads people to find a “trusted person” to “explain things” to them. A list of rules to follow. I won’t talk about this part any more because it’s unfixable, and I know exactly why it happens. And because I only want to talk about how it’s relevant to my art and writing, disability and trauma! Which by the fucking way, c/PTSD IS A DISABILITY! It’s a fucking ACCESS ISSUE. I will not argue about that unless you pay me, and I won’t take any money here.

I have tied my own hands once again for my own mental health, much like I did by writing Silverfell in advance.

So.

The zeitgeist of desperately seeking rules has created what, as a far as I can tell, are Two Boxes.

Please note that people (DISINGENUOUSLY!) decided that the same media criticism structures apply to individuals making something for 3 other people, that apply to global billion dollar megaliths like Disney. Because corporations are people, my friend! And because of social media being used as advertising flattens both entities into a few lines of text.

Two Boxes.

The first is “wholesome content”. It’s empty, because it is _entirely_ defined by what it ISN’T. Putting anything in it _taints_ it. It’s a lot like whiteness that way!

The second is labeled “basic sexual content, consensual sex, violence, abuse, rape, cusswords (wtf??), difficult relationships, ANY non-familial relationships, gay kissing, straight kissing, characters who say words, realistic challenges in parenting, gender exploration...”

I could go on and on.

But the scariest part of that for me is the sheer amount of people who, even if they don’t agree with what is or isn’t “allowed” to be written about or expressed through art….

**Is that they still accept that the boxes are there at all.**

Anyone accepting that consensual sex, cursing, and rape are “the same type of content” scares me, no matter what _kind_ of opinions they might have about it.

My art and writing ignores those boxes because they aren’t real. Full stop.

The

-flattening/distortion of crucial issues

-refusal of disingenuous people to define what they mean by words like “abuse”

-the STOLEN and intentionally distorted meaning of words necessary to extremely vulnerable people to describe their experiences, like “pedophile” or “triggered”

creates a circuitous tower of babel in which you really just have to judge people by their conduct, and art/stories by their entire content instead of what someone else _tells_ you it is.

Which uh. Honestly might not be a bad thing. Let life be as complicated as it is, and make your own fucking choices about shit. I cannot tell you how many times I have literally had to BEG people to do that. They don’t.

I guess it its own way it’s the same thing that show The Good Place posits as its central philosophical conundrum.

The only way I can see to avoid this issue is to stop being a hapless morass of people complaining about how scary it is that no one can stop you from going outside and just eating fucking dirt off the ground, holy shit. What is wrong with y’all. Just _eat your fucking dirt_ or _don’t_ , that doesn’t have shit to do with other random strangers, no matter what social media tries to imply.

It’s not our fault that every privacy blanket we try and hang up in this apocalyptic cattle car to hell gets torn down by billionaires who demand we form a fucking human centipede in every goddamn online space because “advertising” or whatever, but by god, I do not have to accept it, and neither do you. Respect people’s **stated boundaries** , for fuck’s sakes.

I have more triggers than you can break a stick at, and some of them make me unable to do necessary functions for as long as a week, or months. Depending. That’s part of why I do absolutely everything in my power to prepare people for the content I write about, and tell them what it is before they have to just be immersed in it. But this worsening online environment is making it impossible for me to effectively communicate, even in the most casual of arenas.

I use words I feel sure about, and do my best to get creative in order to make sure this comes across!!

It doesn’t stop people from ragequitting my fics, and often kicking me on the way out. As in fic, so in life. I’m kinda used to it, to the point where I just leave that shit where it lies unless it’s short and pure, like “kill yourself” or “fucking gross”. Less than a sentence gets deleted.

It bothers me much less than people who demand I explain _what I did_ to make people hate me so much, or those who refuse to acknowledge that they do.

I’m not immune from wanting to dodge accountability in the sense of...I want to save myself some of the trouble of being forced to explain my right to exist as I am, over and over and over, to every single person who stumbles across my hunched and toadlike existence. I didn’t ask you to come here, even if I want friends and attention and compliments just as much as anyone else!! I’m eating my dirt without permission or approval, but I _will_ just fucking lie and tell you it’s a burger because I’m not going to argue with you about it.

I’m fairly certain people who accept the existence of the Two Boxes aren’t going to like my work, whether it’s the things they find cute, or the mirrors for ugliness we all have in our hearts.

My writing and art usually isn’t hardcore enough for those who accept the Two Boxes and tend towards “I like the Harry Potter Makes You Go To Hell box”/ “I’m a piece of shit for liking this tee hee”; they’re just gonna get bored. This isn’t a criticism. I just already spent my early 20s doing photorealistic portraits of cock and ball torture and grinning smugly next to them in a physical gallery, and I’d still do it if I felt like I was being emotionally honest with it. But it’s not really me. Who I am is much scarier than that.

And obviously my stuff’s immediately unacceptable to those who accept the Two Boxes and want something where everyone learns The Benefits of Emotionally and Physically Castrating Yourself like we’re a Veggie Tale or whatever they’re expecting.

^^^ This is why I can’t believe anyone reads my work or looks at my art.

It is neither fish nor fowl, but in the end the contaminating presence of conflict that sullies my work in the eyes of those who demand the Empty Box makes the call.

But at the same time? I believe in the transformative power of fiction. I believe we can...you know. All the inspirational shit people say!

Something people might not expect?

I _do_ think fiction affects reality and our worldviews. However, I could have (could/have) written a textbook about it, BUT we’re living in a Twitter motherfucking world, babey.

I refuse to accept a flawed paradigm, and I always. fucking. Will. :)

Hell yeah I just :)’d you.

Throughout my life and in pretty much all facets of it, two things remain true.

I literally can’t shut up or I’ll die. Feeling like I _can’t_ say something does a Bad Thing to my Brain.

My best and worst quality are the same thing: no one can tell me shit.

But maybe, perhaps, I would _like_ for people to tell me shit. I love nothing more than being convinced of things, or shown a reason for something. I want to see all the good and bad and in between shit, I want to understand other people and have them understand me. I want it _so much_ , it’s fucking _embarrassing_.

I also want to just enjoy my life, because I was already dying of preventable and treatable conditions in a hole of unclimbable poverty, just like a good american, when I began this. I didn’t want everyone else to fall down here with me, because I am a shocking optimist with high standards who also believes the best of people when I shouldn’t. But the fact is, I’ve already been at the “what would you do during your last day on earth” point for...quite some time. Again, I was not actually supposed to live this long in several senses of the phrase. So when pressed to extremes, when pressed to breaking, what comes out?

Welp. Skeleton dicks, alien pussy, sexual acting out, and the radical theme that it’s okay to exist and find love and enjoy good things, even after the worst things possible have happened to you. You don't have to hide your existence from people who complain about how much your survival grosses them out.

That it’s okay to be really fucked up forever, and still give and receive love. Because for a lot of us? There was no “before”! I’m tired of stories about “healing” that are honestly just forms of regression, as far as I can tell. Either way, it’s irrelevant to my experiences. Nevertheless, it’s not fair we have to just keep existing like this forever. And a lot of people would REALLY prefer we don’t!!

Fuck that shit!

My heart is full of so much love, it should _absolutely_ scare the shit out of you. It scares the shit out of me every second of my life!! I don’t actually know how it’s possible I am still capable of joy, love, and good things, and there _is_ something monstrous and perverted about that.

And yet, I have found amazing and incredible love so many times in the spaces between everywhere else. I am able to thrive in some ways even while falling through the cracks of society as well as my own broken soul. That is a source of joy! That is something to celebrate and share!

It’s a fact: I am nonstop weird all the way down to the embarrassingly gooey center. But I DO have a lot of GOOD THINGS, and I’ve been able to find happiness intermittently and sometimes even remember how to feel it, too. And THAT somehow ends up in _everything_ I create, and that’s what you’re uh, Seeing.

A lot of people, even the ones who like my stuff, can’t help but say how “different” it is. And like. I kinda see what they’re seeing.

Those are my real feelings! I’m yelling so you won’t notice my tears!!!

This is The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known.

I’m horrendously sensitive, and I spend a remarkable amount of time trying to keep people from knowing _where_ the soft spots are. A lot of people think no one this weird could also be so painfully self-aware, the same way a lot of people think mentally ill people can’t also know they’re mentally ill.

Most people find my writing and art to be intimidatingly bizarre. An alarming fact is, what I have made is _already_ as “normal” and “less terrifying” and “accessible to actual humans” as I can make it. It was adapted to post from where I usually put it, which is in the hole next to me to look at or reread when I feel like it.

Everything I create is a chaotic, ear-splitting screech of swarming details and unnecessary flourishes to disguise the true horror at the center: the one ugly truth muffled in the beautiful lies I spin to encase it so that singularity can be conveyed at all.

I love the world and everything in it so much I shake and weep with it.

My own boundless, overwhelming capacity for joy and pleasure is so unpredictable and bottomless it frightens me.

If I could shave off slivers and give one to every person on earth and every plankton in the sea, I would do it. Sometimes I think that might make it easier to bear, because none of the unspeakable horrors life has heaped upon me has been able to make me cynical. I am as soft as the day I was born, and I am so strange, you probably won’t notice.

I’ve seen how people’s faces change when they find out the facts of my life on paper, the kinds of things that have been done to me. I should not be alive, logically. I’ve also seen how people’s faces look when you can tell that _you_ aren’t a person to _them_ , and it doesn’t matter what happens to you.

When you know in the calm silence of your heart that no one is coming to save you.

These two remarkably grotesque and directly opposing situations constantly fill me to overflowing, and I am far too fragile and leaky a vessel to hold them all without it creaking out into everything I touch.

There is no box separating them inside me. Not even one box, much less Two Boxes.

They are the same thing.

They’re me.

Funny thing is, no one ever leaves cranky, argumentative comments about magic, or miracles, or Higgs-like fields of skeleton jizz, or aliens, or all the things I made up.

The _only_ things people have ever argued with me about are the things I know for a fact happen to people all the time. And it keeps happening exactly **because** people say it can’t. If it can’t happen, if no one can say it does...well, then.

“Nothing” can happen to just about anyone, and it will!

And “nothing” will keep happening to anyone who can’t stop it from happening to them, which is actually **everyone** , at some point in their lives.

I wonder if they realize what they’re trying to protect. I mean, it’s themselves! But.

I wonder if they know their insistence that nothing happened, and if it did, it couldn’t have been that bad….makes sure it keeps happening.

All I’m saying is I know something about myself that most people don’t, which is what you’re like when you _break_. In my case once I have been utterly smashed beyond repair, unconditional love pours out like blood and I don’t know why. Happens every time. Why is irrelevant. It’s just fucking there.

I can’t spend all my time justifying myself, and I won’t. If I make a habit of interacting with people entirely on their terms, I’ll all ever be able to say again in my life is “so sorry for bleeding all over your carpet.” I can’t live inside an apology for my own existence, because there’s no room for me in there.

Thing is...this isn’t _your_ carpet I’m bleeding on.

It’s mine.

So, uh.

Yeah. I’m going to let the monster other people decided I am out in all its smashed and leaky crab-guts glory, because it’s actually really beautiful. Right along with all the other monsters I have known and loved, in all their eye-searing gorgeousness. Loving myself is what made me a monsterfucker in the first place after all, and that’s why I write and draw. Please don’t think any of this is meant as a justification for what I create. I don’t really do that. Nor are they things I feel like people have to know to absolve themselves of the taint of enjoying what I have created and will continue to create.

I say it because it feels good and true to say it, even when it’s a lie.

Art and fiction are both the same thing: beautiful, hideous lies used to tell a truth so pure it can’t be conveyed any other way.

“I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.”  
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Love Is Real.”

-― Chuck Tingle


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